San Antonio Government

The 1981 election of Henry Cisneros as mayor of San Antonio was seen as the culminating victory in the Chicano community's decades-long struggle for inclusion in the city's political life. Yet business interests continue to set the city's political and economic priorities. The author offers an in-depth history of the Chicano community's struggle for inclusion in the political life of San Antonio during 1951 to 1991, drawn from interviews with key participants as well as archival research.

Culmination of urban historian David Johnson's extensive research into the development of Texas's oldest city. Beginning with its formation more than 300 years ago, lays out the factors that drove the largely uneven and unplanned distribution of resources and amenities and analyzes the demographics that transformed the city from a frontier settlement into a diverse and complex modern metropolis. Deep dives into city archives rounded out portraits of Sam Maverick, Henry B. Gonzales, Lila Cockrell, and others.

This work addresses questions concerning the theory of the state through the use of a nonlinear dynamical theoretical model. This model identifies the principal structural reasons for the state's autonomy even though the state is a creation of the dynamical social relations of any society.

In the mid-1960s, San Antonio, Texas, was a segregated city governed by an entrenched Anglo social and business elite. Then the striking farmworkers of South Texas marched through the city and set off a social movement that transformed the barrios and ultimately brought down the old Anglo oligarchy.

Explores six transformative city and countywide efforts over the past decade: 8-mile Mission Reach expansion of the iconic River Walk; renovation of the San Antonio Municipal Auditorium into the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts; Expansion of the University Health System; criminal justice reform; efforts to become a tech leader in biomedicine, aerospace, and cybersecurity; and the creation of BiblioTech, the country's first all-digital public library. Nelson Wolff, Bexar County judge and former San Antonio mayor, has been an active participant in the city's political and business community for five decades.

San Antonio's heritage has not been preserved by accident. The wrecking balls and headlong development that accompanied progress in nineteenth-century San Antonio roused a local historic preservation movement. The Alamo and four other Spanish missions, recently marked as a UNESCO World Heritage site, are the most obvious but there are a host of landmarks and folkways that have survived over the course of nearly three centuries.

The 2010 US Census data showed that over the last decade the Latino population grew from 35.3 million to 50.5 million. The editors have collected essays that examine this phenomenal growth.

Explores the role race and racism played in the Texas redistricting process and the creation and passage of the state's Voter Identification Law in 2011. Provides an analysis of court decisions concerning the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, the Voting Rights Act, and a thorough discussion of the Shelby County decision. The core of the book centers on two federal court trials where both the state's congressional, house redistricting efforts, and the Voter ID Bill were found to violate the Voting Rights Act.